Some nights in the Croydon cc hut in Ystrafellte weve found a dozen or so phones festooned from every socket in the building (which is a bit pointless as there is no signal there!) and the issue has been raised as to whether to try and stop this due to the fire risk .We are thinking of having having a red painted ammo box on the wall which you can put the blazing phone in and then throw out the window - some airlines are going to do something like this (but obviously not throw it out the window !) . The question I need to know is should the lid be clamped down ? would this put the fire out through lack of oxygen or would it continue to burn and burst the box open?-chris crowley
The answer is almost certainly no - you shouldn't try and stop people charging their phones (at least for this reason).
The time spent worrying about it is almost certainly better spent worrying about almost anything else - like the current quality of your wiring and if it is regularly tested, whether you have appropriate in-date smoke alarms in every room, whether you only have modern gas equipment and CO alarms, whether all your furniture is appropriately fire-resistant, whether your emergency lighting works, whether the mesh grilles in any cooker ventilation hoods are clean, whether the toaster is free of crumbs...
With the brief (and exciting) exception of the Samsung Note 8, phones just don't catch fire at any regularity (and even with those you still had to be pretty unlucky for anything to go wrong, let alone a catastrophic problem). We've all got phones plugged in at home left on overnight without managing to burn the place down...
If an electrical device is going to catch fire, I strongly suspect it's far more likely to be a charger than a phone - whether that's a phone charger or a headlight charger or whatever. Also, if something does catch fire, it's more than likely there isn't someone supervising it to chuck it anywhere anyway, plus you don't want to be handling it if it does - you want an extinguisher.
I suspect the danger due to an extra trip to the hut to set up some sort of phone-fire-box would exceed the benefit (since driving is genuinely dangerous).
